If only we could still play scratch our vinyl records while speeding down country lanes.

What’s the connection between the Beatles’ George Harrison, boxing legend Muhammad Ali, and Chrysler cars? The Highway Hi-Fi: a vinyl record player that just happened to be the world’s first in-car music system. It appeared 60 years ago this spring, in 1956, and should have been a smash hit. It was innovatory, a major talking point, arrived as the car market was booming as never before, and it came with much press hype. It also had the backing of a leading motor manufacturer. What could possibly go wrong?

Unlike car radios—which had already been around for more than a decade—the Highway Hi-Fi actually gave you a choice. The records you wanted to play were picked by you rather than by a DJ in a radio station miles away, and those discs could hold some 90 minutes of music. This playing time was twice what you could get from a normal vinyl record of the mid-1950s—a trick accomplished by dragging the Highway Hi-Fi’s playing speed down to a mere 16.66 RPM, half that of a normal vinyl album. In technological terms, this was seen as a minor miracle.

The Highway Hi-Fi, in action.

And yet, within a year of launch, sales were plummeting, and 12 months after that the Highway Hi-Fi was being withdrawn—also soon to be the fate of companies that "copied" the format.

So what went wrong? There were certainly no problems with the credentials of the main Highway Hi-Fi designer, Peter Goldmark, who had already created the LP microgroove, thus refining and, in a sense, defining the sound of vinyl albums for decades to come. Nor was there any skimping on the software technicalities, for the Highway Hi-Fi music discs were heavy, quality pressings of 135-gram vinyl with ultra-fine grooves—over 216 grooves per centimetre.

But, as Sony’s Betamax team was to find out more than a quarter of a century later, just creating the tech sometimes isn’t enough—you need people to actually use the tech as well. When it came to Betamax, Sony had failed to strike any major content deals with film studios. The result? It was outflanked and eventually destroyed by the VHS format, which had movie agreements in place. But Betamax tapes continued to be made, albeit in ever-dwindling numbers, right up until—well—now.

Initially, Highway Hi-Fi had zero rivals. And the firms behind the format—being, essentially, a creation of Chrysler's and Columbia Records’ special products divisions—took the easy way out by opting to have only Columbia’s CBS music discs available for Highway Hi-Fi. Enthusiasts could bring their own albums into the car… but they couldn’t actually play them on the Highway Hi-Fi, unless, that is, they wanted the painful effect of hearing them at half their 33⅓ RPM speed.

In other words, the in-car format of choice was not actually delivering that much choice. Plus, only Chrysler cars came kitted out with the Highway Hi-Fi, along with the added bugbear that they had to be factory-installed, too. The tech could not be handled—or even easily repaired—by the local car garage.